Recent trends in biomedical diagnostics and drug discovery suggest a rapid growth in the use of high-speed and high throughput chemical detection, screening, and compound synthesis. Several systems utilize expensive instruments that make use of large sample volumes and are difficult to transport. Efforts are being directed to accelerate drug delivery and therapeutics, contain high health care costs, and provide decentralized biomedical diagnostics, such as diagnostics for point of care and future technologies. Such efforts frequently focus on increased miniaturization, integration, and automation.
Micro-instrumentation that is based on integrating large parallel arrays of miniaturized fluid systems and sensors have been developed that reduce reagent volume and sample contamination. Such instrumentation may also provide faster and more efficient compounding and separations in biomedical and analytical applications. Tasks that are frequently performed in a series of bench-top instruments and chemical tests may be combined into a single portable unit.
In micro-fluidic systems, liquids are frequently passed through small channels and have relatively little inertia. In such an environment, viscous and capillary forces frequently dominate the flow patterns. Active valves or pumping equipment are frequently included in such micro-fluidic systems in order to ensure proper flow. Such active valves or pumping equipment on a micro scale may be relatively complicated and expensive to form.